On David Sneed's first day at Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science and Technology last fall, he attended his first six classes
without seeing another black face. It wasn't until the last period of
the day that he discovered another black freshman. The only
other black freshman. "I looked around and I was like, 'Wow! There
aren't many others like me,' " David recalls. "People are really
friendly here, but I still feel pretty self-conscious about it
sometimes."

In just one day, David learned firsthand that to be black—or
Hispanic—at one of the most prestigious public high schools in
America is to be a rarity. In David's freshman class of 430, there are
only two black students and seven Hispanic students, down from 21 and
19, respectively, four years ago. Of 1,671 students at Thomas Jefferson
this year, 94 percent are white or Asian-American.

Those numbers have caused an uproar in the well-off Washington
suburb of Fairfax County, Va., echoing in microcosm scores of
affirmative action disputes nationwide. What began as an exploration of
ways to mend the expanding racial divide at this distinguished magnet
school has boiled over into a painful debate about racism, poverty,
merit, and opportunity. Teachers, parents, students, and administrators
have wrestled with the issue in spirited hallway arguments, tense
school board meetings, and hostile voice-mail exchanges.

"This has been a very difficult issue," says Jane K. Strauss, the
immediate past chairwoman of the Fairfax County school board. "The
community has been pretty heated about it. I can show you the
wounds."

At the nondescript, sprawling brick building known to most of the
community as TJ, students are all too aware of the controversy, and
many smile good-naturedly and roll their eyes when asked about it. In
these halls, lined with pale-yellow, '60s-vintage tile and rows of
dark-blue metal lockers, students of all races describe feeling part of
a family at TJ, where being passionate about things like differential
equations isn't a source of embarrassment.

Here, where the current average SAT score is 1470, and after- school
activities include entomology and geoscience clubs, ordinary-looking
kids in frayed jeans, lugging typically overstuffed backpacks, might
spend part of lunch discussing their love lives and part debating
Hegel.

People are really friendly here, but I still feel
pretty self-conscious about it sometimes.

David
Sneed,

One of two black students in his
class at Thomas Jefferson High School

The feeling of intellectual ferment creates bonds between students,
and makes them care deeply about preserving the system that fostered
it. Some worry that changing the admissions policy to admit more
students from lower-income areas—as the school board recently
decided to do in response to the concerns about a decline in
diversity—would bring in less-capable students.

"I don't want to compromise what TJ is based on," says Teresa
Nguyen, 17, a senior from a modest neighborhood whose parents were born
in Vietnam. "If you add more people that aren't as motivated, and they
are being added in just because of geography, those people might
adversely affect the overall environment."

At the same time, many teenagers here believe there are too few
black and Hispanic students, and consider a varied enrollment an
important, enriching part of school life. It's not hard to find
students who welcome changes in admissions that will bring in a wider
variety of students. But others say that insufficient diversity would
be better addressed by making sure disadvantaged students have the kind
of education in elementary and middle school to enable them to gain
admission, rather than by revising the process.

"The focus needs to be earlier," says Tarik Jones, 16, a junior who
is the president of the Black Student Union. Coming from a family with
two college-educated parents, and attending a middle school where he
was placed into a program for gifted children, carved a pathway for him
to TJ's doors, he says.

After school district lawyers, mindful of recent federal court
cases, advised district leaders in 1998 against any race- conscious
policy, the district dropped race as a factor in its intensely
competitive admissions process and dismantled a much-lauded preparation
program for disadvantaged students. Since then, district officials have
watched Thomas Jefferson population grow less and less representative
of the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the 165,000-student
Fairfax County system.

"I was shocked, stunned, by the numbers," says Elizabeth Lodal, who
became TJ's principal in the fall of 2000. "It wasn't a comfortable
thing for people to talk about. I started talking about it."

It became clear that six of the district's 24 middle schools,
largely in affluent neighborhoods where children are raised with their
sights on Jefferson and parents can afford expensive preparation
courses, account for as much as half of each entering class. Another
half-dozen schools, located in lower-income neighborhoods with larger
portions of black, Hispanic, and immigrant families, send few, if any,
students to Jefferson.

District officials have watched the Thomas Jefferson
population grow less and less representative of the growing diversity
of the Fairfax County system.

The result: a far larger share of the school's enrollment is white
or Asian, and from well-to-do families, than the student profile of the
district as a whole.

Lodal shared her concerns about the racial disparity with
Superintendent Daniel A. Domenech, who responded last October by
proposing that each middle school be guaranteed a certain number of
spaces at Jefferson, in proportion to its share of the district's 8th
grade population. The intention was to boost access for students from
underrepresented middle schools.

Parents in attendance areas that sent disproportionately large
numbers to Jefferson protested passionately, arguing that the measure
would effectively place a Jefferson attendance cap on their schools,
denying qualified children entry. At one school board work session on
the proposal, some community members booed and heckled the
superintendent. The proposal was withdrawn.

Strauss then thought: If parents are angry that pieces of the pie
are being taken away from some children and given to others, why not
make the pie bigger? The board agreed, approving on Dec. 6 her proposal
to admit to Thomas Jefferson a total of up to 30 additional freshmen
each year from underrepresented middle schools. Jefferson draws about
15 percent of its students from several surrounding Virginia counties
and cities, but the new policy will not affect admission of those
students.

Otherwise, the admissions process remains the same: Eighth graders
whose grades and performance on an SAT-like admissions test rank them
in the top 800 applicants make the first cut. A screening committee
then offers admission to the 420 or so in that pool whose writing
samples, teacher recommendations, and résumés of
extracurricular activities suggest they are the most likely to succeed
at Jefferson. Starting next fall, the committee will choose from the
pool of 800 an additional group of up to 30 students who come from
underrepresented middle schools, giving careful consideration to
students from low-income families.

And so it was that an effort that arose out of concern at the lack
of fair racial representation produced a solution that nearly all its
architects and proponents, including Strauss, admit is unlikely to
deliver many more black and Hispanic students to Jefferson.The new
policy's most optimistic supporters hope that targeting lower-income
neighborhoods—which tend to have disproportionately large shares
of black and Hispanic families—will produce greater racial and
ethnic diversity as a byproduct. Most view the new approach as a
compromise—one that can't get directly at racial balance,
perhaps, but could deliver another desirable result instead: opening
the doors of Jefferson to more children from poorer families.

But other voices call attention to what they say still needs to be
done. Adding more spots at Jefferson, they say, won't help
disadvantaged students get into a high school nearly as selective as
the Ivy League because they lack proper preparation. Too few such
youngsters are chosen for gifted programs—a high-yield pipeline
for Jefferson—and too few hail from families with the money and
savvy to arrange for test-preparation classes. Most kids in low-income
neighborhoods, these critics contend, have never even heard of TJ.

"Adding 30 kids is very noble, but it's something we are doing just
to say we are doing something," says Isis Castro, a Cuban-born member
of the school board. "Adding the seats doesn't matter if kids don't
have the preparation. Some of these kids have been getting ready [for
the entrance test] since elementary school. Some see the test for the
first time the day they take it."

The dwindling numbers of blacks and Hispanics at Thomas Jefferson
are ironic in light of the school's origins. Born in 1985, when the
United States saw itself as "a nation at risk" of losing out to more
highly skilled international competitors, the school's vision was to
train future technology luminaries, with a special written pledge from
the school board to mirror the racial and ethnic makeup of its
community.

While it undoubtedly channels some of the nation's most brilliant
students toward impressive colleges and careers, its story in recent
years has become one of struggle, as the school found it harder and
harder to cling to its goal of diversity amid a tangle of legal,
social, and demographic forces.

In the past 20 years, the student population of the Fairfax County
district has shifted from 16 percent minority to 41 percent, fueled
largely by growth among Asian- Americans and Hispanics. Well-off
families, largely white and Asian, flocked to Fairfax County's lightly
wooded enclaves of diplomats and lawyers who commute across the Potomac
River to Washington. Many working-class immigrant, black, and Hispanic
families, meanwhile, clustered in the bungalows and townhouses of the
county's more modest neighborhoods.

Adding 30 kids is very noble, but it's something we
are doing just to say we are doing something.

Isis Castro,

School board
member

Within a few years after Jefferson opened its doors, it became clear
that a far greater proportion of white and Asian students were acing
the admissions test than were their black and Hispanic counterparts,
recalls Geoffrey A. Jones, who was the principal from the fall of 1988
until the spring of 2000.

So the school launched a privately financed program called Visions,
which identified promising Hispanic and African-American middle school
students and offered them an intensive, two- year preparation program
for Jefferson. Visions' offerings ranged from in-depth, hands-on
science projects with high-school mentors to detailed coaching for the
admissions test. Its success was clear-cut: Each year, 20 to 30 Visions
graduates enrolled at Jefferson.

Jefferson's admissions process, too, paid special attention to
including black and Hispanic students. Each year, it admitted many
whose overall records made them promising candidates, even though their
test scores and grades had ranked them far below the pool of 800
semifinalists, Domenech says.

Then the legal breezes shifted, leading to the school board's 1998
decision to abandon the use of race as a factor in admissions.
Domenech, who immigrated to the United States from Cuba as a boy, still
sees the former policy's results as proof of his conviction that the
county teems with far more potentially successful black and Hispanic
students than those captured in the semifinalist pool.

The superintendent points out that in the graduating class of
2001—one of the last classes admitted using the race-conscious
policy—a girl who was ranked number 1,448 on the admissions test
later graduated with a grade point average of 3.82, while the
third-ranked applicant graduated with a GPA of 3.75.

"The thing that upset me in hearing criticism of my proposal was we
would be diluting the pool and quality at Jefferson, and yet here is a
school whose reputation was built on the shoulders of these very
students," Domenech says.

Around the time the school dropped race as a factor in admissions,
the county decided that it could not finance Visions when its grant
money ran out, since that could be construed as public funding of a
race-conscious program. The local education foundation used its own
money to launch a program called Quest, a science and technology
enrichment program for black and Hispanic middle-schoolers. But many
parents complained that since Quest did not prepare children
specifically for Jefferson, it did little to promote black and Hispanic
enrollment.

The struggle to achieve more racially diverse schools has been
playing out across the country for several decades, as courts frowned
first on race-conscious college-admissions policies and, more recently,
on the use of race in assigning students to public K-12 schools. Two
selective public secondary schools—Lowell in San Francisco and
Boston Latin—have in the past few years lost high-profile legal
struggles to preserve programs aimed at creating what they believed to
be fair racial balance. Since abandoning those policies, the schools
have seen the numbers of black and Hispanic students edging
downward.

In Fairfax County, school board lawyers watched carefully as two
cases from nearby Arlington County, Va., and Montgomery County, Md.,
wound their way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based
in Richmond. That court struck down race- conscious student-assignment
programs in both districts in 1999.

Maree Sneed— no relation to David, the TJ student—is a
partner at the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson and
represents a number of school districts on issues including
desegregation. She notes that the U.S. Supreme Court has never decided
whether the possible educational benefits of diversity justify
race-conscious admissions, and that federal appellate courts have sent
mixed messages on the question. But such courts generally hold school
districts to a strict standard when they attempt to defend the
consideration of race in student assignments.

The struggle to achieve more racially diverse schools
has been playing out across the country for several decades.

"Whatever schools do, they have to do it very carefully," Sneed
says.

As districts become more aware of the risks of defending race-
conscious practices, she says, they are increasingly exploring
income-based affirmative action policies as a way to help disadvantaged
youngsters obtain high-quality schooling.

Some experts view the legal tension over race-conscious policies as
an opportunity to improve educational outreach methods that are
flawed.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a
Washington think tank, says research has shown that race-based
admission policies tend to benefit upper-class and upper-middle-class
students of color. Focusing on students from low-income families, he
believes, would produce a fairer result.

"We ought to be trying to find ways to help the most disadvantaged,
of any race, who show promise," Kahlenberg says.

But some see the shift in the focus to economically disadvantaged
students as an attempt to reclaim race-based affirmative action through
a back door.

"It's very hard for me to believe that anything else is going on [in
Fairfax County] than an effort to get at racial and ethnic numbers,"
says Roger Clegg, the vice president and general counsel of the Center
for Equal Opportunity, a Sterling, Va.-based nonprofit organization
that opposes race-conscious policies in educational admissions and
other areas. "What the school district should be doing is deciding what
the best way is to measure academic ability, and let the chips fall
where they may without worrying about the racial and ethnic mix."

How best to measure academic ability is itself the subject of much
disagreement. Many take issue with the test-heavy admissions process at
Thomas Jefferson High. Some, including Kahlenberg, believe selective
schools should use a broader definition of merit, including such
factors as a student's ability to overcome difficulty.

Parents closest to the scuffles around the racial politics of
admission at Jefferson have experienced the debate in ways that are a
deep and complex blend of personal history and political
conviction.

They bring many views to the subject. Louise K. Epstein, a
half-white, half-Japanese woman from the tony suburb of McLean, Va.,
recalls being bused in the 1960s from her apartment in a largely black
public housing project in Staten Island, N.Y., to a working-class,
predominantly white school as part of a school integration program.
Epstein, a Harvard graduate who hopes her 7th grader will attend TJ,
says other parents accused her of racism when she became one of the
most vocal opponents of Superintendent Domenech's geographic-quota
plan, arguing that it would lower the academic caliber of the
school.

"I'm defending a system that rewards merit," she says of Jefferson's
race-blind admissions policy. "I know what I'm saying is politically
incorrect, but I will no longer bite my tongue because someone calls me
a racist."

Idalia C. Duncan, a Cuban-born teacher whose daughter did not get
into Jefferson, finds such a debate painful. "It angers me when people
say [admitting more disadvantaged students] will water down TJ," she
says. "We Hispanic and African- American parents want to keep the
quality, but we want help. We need help. We don't all have the same
advantages, even if we have the same aptitude."

What the school district should be doing is
deciding what the best way is to measure academic ability, and let
the chips fall where they may without worrying about the racial and
ethnic mix.

Roger Clegg,

Vice President

Center for Equal Opportunity

Judith Howard, an African-American, Harvard-trained lawyer whose
daughter attends TJ, believes the admission argument boils down to
whether public resources are being used equitably. But to her dismay,
the debate laid bare some agonizing biases.

"This issue got completely out of hand," she says. "The racist and
classist undertones of a lot of these debates have really offended me.
Some parents are up in arms because they are terrifically self-
interested, and concerned their kids won't get into TJ. They feel
[admission to Jefferson] is an entitlement. People were saying the same
kinds of things 30 years ago in Virginia when they were desegregating
schools."

Ying-Ying Li, a real estate agent whose son attends the school, says
it is a "cheap shot" to bring racism into the argument about Jefferson.
Li, a Chinese immigrant, says race has nothing to do with her belief
that the admissions procedures should be left alone. The problem of
racial disparity in achievement can't be solved at the admissions
office, she says, but should be addressed where it has its roots: in
the home and in elementary and middle schools.

"You have to put more [resources] into low-performing schools," Li
says. "And you have to get to the parents. If parents don't insist
[that children] bring A's and B-pluses back home, children won't
succeed."

The importance of equal access to a good education is personal for
Principal Lodal, who is white. In a soft lilt that recalls her
childhood in West Texas, she talks about growing up poor, with a
guidance counselor clueless about college-admission tests, delivered to
Rice University only by the grace and determination of a father who
researched the SAT and drove her two hours to take the test.

"If a child isn't blessed with parents who have the financial
resources or the time and information to lobby on his behalf, then that
child can be left behind at an early point and it's hard, if not
impossible, to catch up," she says.

Emmanuel Slade, who teaches senior government at Jefferson and
advises the Black Student Union, says the plan to add 30 additional
students to Jefferson "feels like crumbs" to him. He finds the debate
"discouraging and disheartening," like turning back the hands of time
to a less racially enlightened age. He remembers all too well the day
he became the first black child to integrate a North Carolina public
elementary school in 1967. Soon afterward, his family's mailbox was
firebombed, and a carload of young white men tried to run him down, he
says.

"I worry that when you are in a group in which you've always been
entitled to all of the concepts of what the American dream is, that you
become blind to the plight of others," Slade says.

It wasn't only the suggestion of racism but also of class bias that
rankled some in this community.

"The comments of parents and others opposed to change at TJ were
tinged with feelings of a kind you would not want to hear from citizens
of this country," says Robert E. Frye, a black school board member.
"Like, 'This is our school, and we worked hard to get kids ready,' and
it's almost like, 'We don't want the unwashed or unlettered communities
sending their kids here.' "

It is in this thicket of mores that Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science and Technology has tried to find its way, attempting to include
a wider variety of students without depriving any of what they secured
after years of preparation. Even as legal concerns barred it from
addressing race directly, the Fairfax County district has been under
pressure to improve minority access not only to Jefferson, but also to
all its top-caliber programs.It is in this thicket of mores that Thomas
Jefferson High School for Science and Technology has tried to find its
way, attempting to include a wider variety of students without
depriving any of what they secured after years of preparation. Even as
legal concerns barred it from addressing race directly, the Fairfax
County district has been under pressure to improve minority access not
only to Jefferson, but also to all its top-caliber programs.

The district's own Minority Student Achievement Oversight Committee
complained bitterly last year in its most recent report that despite
seven years of pressure, the county still had not significantly
improved the proportions of black and Hispanic youngsters in its
programs for the gifted. The Fairfax County NAACP is still wrangling
with the district over that issue, which it outlined in a 1998
complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for
Civil Rights.

Numbers tell part of the story. Only 5 percent of the students in
the county's programs for the gifted last year were African-American,
although black students make up nearly 11 percent of the district's
enrollment. Similarly, only 4 percent were Hispanic, a disproportionate
number given their 14 percent share of the district's makeup. Whites
accounted for 73 percent of the high-caliber programs, though they make
up 56 percent of the district's enrollment. Asian students, meanwhile,
reflected their district population with 16 percent in both gifted
program and the student population.

‘The comments of parents and others opposed
to change at TJ were tinged with feelings of a kind you would not
want to hear from citizens of this country.’

Robert E. Frye,

School board
member

District officials all the way up to Superintendent Domenech
acknowledge that Fairfax County—like many school districts across
the country—suffers from an achievement gap between students of
different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and they say they are taking
steps to address the problem. The district initiated the Young Scholars
Program, which will offer accelerated studies for black and Hispanic
children in low-income areas, and is revising its screening procedure
for gifted programs to reduce bias against children who lack strong
language skills, Domenech says. With $85,000 from the local education
foundation, the district is redesigning the Quest program to better
prepare black and Hispanic children for Jefferson.

Jefferson itself is increasing its outreach to low-income areas,
distributing booklets to middle schools that outline TJ's admissions
test and urging middle school counselors to spread the word about
applying. The diversity committee of the magnet school's
parent-teacher-student association has also begun reception/orientation
sessions for parents of high-achieving minority middle- schoolers to
familiarize them with Jefferson, and is sponsoring test- preparation
sessions at local libraries.

Even with those concentrated efforts to level the playing field,
however, some still worry that things won't change much for
disadvantaged students until there are more schools that can offer top-
quality learning.

Kathryn A. McDermott, an assistant professor of education and public
policy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, says debates over
access to top-flight public schools like Jefferson, Lowell, and Boston
Latin highlight the issue of educational quality more vividly than do
debates over university affirmative action policies. The stakes are
higher at such highly competitive high schools, since there are so few,
McDermott argues, whereas if students don't get into an Ivy League
school, there are still many other high-quality colleges they might
attend.

"The solution is to deal with the tremendous variation in quality
that we have in our public education system," she says. "It would take
the pressure off these prestigious crown jewels of public education if
the public felt they had alternatives that were just as good. For a lot
people, it doesn't feel that way."

In TJ's famously liberated hallways, where students sprawl on
linoleum floors to study or chat without any need of a hall pass,
opinion on what many call "the diversity issue" comes in all forms.
delete delete deleteMakeda Kefale, 16, an African-American junior,
jokes that all the school's black and Hispanic students "can fit in one
little conference room." Taking a break from a hallway video shoot, she
says that being in such a minority was "nothing different" for her,
since her upscale, largely white neighborhood has few African-
Americans.

Makeda's classmate Micaela Cooper, also an African-American, was
"shocked" by how few black and Hispanic students there were at TJ when
she arrived two years ago. But she doesn't think the admissions process
should be changed. "Some of my friends and I think, 'We made it to the
school. Why should you lower the standard?' " she says.

Another opinion, lugging a huge backpack, is around the corner.

"I think it's a great idea to add 30 more kids here," says Mark
Gray-Mendes, 16, a junior who is white, hurrying to his next class.
"All it can do is enrich our environment. There's plenty of room here
for everyone."

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